Equippables

This describes how game assets are created, which involves serious amount of scripting and automation


This is sub-layout for documentation pages

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1 What is equippable

Equippable reffers to any item, that character might wear or wield. We want to display such equippables graphically.
An example can be a red cape, displyed in following image:

2 The problem with creation

The problem is, that if we would render all possible combination of equipment for the player (sheet with cape, sheet without cape, sheet with boots + cape etc.) This would result in so large amount of textures to load that it wold become impossible to load

3 The solution

The idea is to render player animation for all sides, but for only the item equipped. If this can be done, then we can draw player animation, and over that draw cape animation, creating effect that the cape is worn.


3.1 Greenscreen masking

In order to be able to achieve the solution above, we need to key out the player mesh.
In the following image you can see the original render (on the left), then keyed out player, and on the right is the resulting equipment.

Obviously, this could be done in photoshop, but not for 20 frame animation, multiplied by 8 angles, multiplied by amount of equippables for which you want to do it

3.2 The blender setup
On the right, you can see the world. All the objects have greenscreen material assigned. On the left is the final result, that you get when you use keying node in the compositing Here is an example of melee attack (orientation left-up), masking out everything but the cape:


3.3 Origin point definition

We must define an origin point, relative to the parent Player's current animation bounding rectangle for the cape / equipment to display correctly. If we would not do it, we would get following result:

If you look carefully, you will see, that the cape is animated (very subtle animation). The only thing left is to position it correctly.